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Climb Advisors Weekly M&A Deals Newsletter
The Week in Review
Nick @ Climb
December 24, 2023
Happy Holidays & welcome to Climb Advisor’s weekly deal newsletter highlighting transactions announced last week across the B2B tech landscape.
Climb Advisors is an M&A and credit advisory firm focused on B2B software and services companies in the range of $5m to $50m+ enterprise value. We guide CEOs and business owners through the process of selling their business & assist investors in sourcing & closing great deals. We love to talk markets and share beneficial information - please reach out any time.
Carlyle and Insight Partners acquire majority stake in Exiger
Overview: Global investment firm Carlyle and leading software investor Insight Partners have announced a majority investment in risk visibility platform Exiger at a reported $1.2B valuation. The New York based startup‘s set of AI powered solutions helps clients across commercial and government markets with ESG, cyber, financial crime, third-party and supply chain management. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Mega deal here in risk-tech with a reported $1.2B valuation on Exiger and almost 800 employees listed on LI. Exiger offers enterprises and government agencies ability to have ‘nth level visibility’ into a supply chain. They currently serve 150 of the Fortune 500, suggesting immediate growth potential to come from this investment.
PSG Equity backed Traliant acquires eLearning provider Kantola
Overview: Traliant, who provides online compliance training solutions, has announced a deal for Kantola. The San Francisco based startup has a team of 48 employees with their online courses focused on diversity, equity, inclusion and harassment prevention in the workplace. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Traliant covers a wide range of mandated employee courses, and they niche down here with an acquisition of Kantola, focused on anti-harassment training. Kantola has a base of 15k+ organizations as customers and likely many of these will benefit from additional training provided by Traliant. Great play for PSG here grabbing a larger slice of the compliance training market.
Cisco announces intent to acquire Isovalent
Overview: Cisco has signaled its intention to acquire Isovalent, a leading cloud networking and security company which raised a $40m Series B round in September 2022. This deal comes as Cisco aims to build on their current cloud security platform, which helps organizations implement security controls to protect against threats to valuable data stored on the cloud. Isovalent’s software also allows for increased visibility when running applications built on the cloud, which is pivotal when it comes to building security systems that can protect a workload while it runs. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Cool deal here. Cisco invested in Isovalent’s Series A in 2020 and has stayed close with the company. Cisco also recently (September) announced plans to acquire Splunk in a $28B cash deal. Seems there will be good interplay between Splunk and Isovalent as integration takes place.
Tom Gillis, SVP & GM of security at Cisco details the acquisition HERE. Gets technical pretty fast but Isovalent leverages what is called eBPF to allow developers to run programs at the core (kernel) of an operating system without risking change to the fundamental structure of the operating system. eBPF is an open-source protocol and Isovalent is tied closely to the genesis of it. Parallels here to IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat.
Thematically, we again see the value of security & compliance to enterprise customers, the market uncertainty & opportunity caused by changing dynamics around cloud computing & increased use of AI, and legacy players acquiring frontier tech in order to stay competitive.
ECI Software Solutions snaps up Treetop
Overview: This deal sees ECI, who are backed by Leonard Green & Partners, broaden both their offerings and presence in Europe. The Netherlands based Treetop specializes in providing software to the residential construction and craft industry such as ERP, CRM, document management, maintenance and service solutions. The announcement marks ECI’s first investment in this vertical outside of North America. Read more here.
Climb Comment: ECI has a wide range of service offerings for construction, manufacturing and more, including various ERPs, planning tools & compliance offerings. Interesting to see them venture into the Netherlands for their first ex-North America investment but makes sense to acquire a leader in a smaller market and expand from there.
Treetop plans to launch a Cloud Native ERP for smaller construction firms in 2024 - this product will likely gain legs across the ECI portfolio.
Altigo acquired by SEI to increase alternative investment offerings
Overview: Altigo, a cloud-based technology platform that provides inventory, e-subscription, and reporting capabilities for alternative investments has joined the SEI (NASDAQ: SEIC) family. The acquirer delivers tech and investment solutions across the financial services industry, with investors showing an increasing demand for alternative investments in recent months. SEI’s ultimate vision is to deliver these investment products to clients in a Software-as-a-Service model and they are buying a set of capabilities needed to deliver an end-to-end solution with this acquisition. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Altigo has the tagline 'making alternative investments as easy to purchase as a mutual fund’ and SEI offers a broad range of services to wealth/asset managers and broker-dealers. Nice fit here for SEI to be able to offer access to a broader range of asset classes right within their own platform.
Alts include things like private equity & venture capital funds, private credit, real estate, as well as more exotic forms like collectibles and highly-structured products. Clients of wealth managers are requesting access to these vehicles, and having a platform like Altigo which provides a friendly UX offers huge value to SEI as they look to land new ground with RIAs and institutions.
Highlights of the week
This week’s first highlight comes in the form of an incredibly insightful article on how the New York Times have devised a strategy based on games and puzzles to reach new users and potential paying subscribers beyond their core news products. This approach has been partly fuelled through M&A with their most high profile being that of Wordle at the start of 2022. Check out the full article here.
Another very interesting article here which details some of Basecamp’s journey in the year since they left the cloud and returned to on-premise computing. They swapped a $3.2m annual cloud budget for about $600k worth of servers and some misc costs and didn’t have any major issues with speed, latency, etc. Worth a read.
Our second highlight of the week is the latest episode of Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s Invest Like the Best podcast. His guest this week, Justin Ishbia, discusses some of his biggest lessons learned through a life that includes acquiring 586 companies - a must for any M&A fanatics out there!
Thanks for following along & hope you found something useful or interesting. We’ll be off next week due to the holidays but wish you all a wonderful break and a terrific New Year.
All the best,
Nick